Couple's home contains portal to past

WINSTON-SALEM - Guests at the home of Reg and Nancy Banner can walk down the stairs and into the past.

They can slide into a vinyl-upholstered booth or onto a vinyl-covered stool and order a banana split or a milkshake. They can slip a penny into a gum machine and receive a candy-coated pellet of gum. They can punch up a tune from Roy Orbison or Elvis Presley or Fats Domino on the Rock-Ola jukebox.

Reg, 66, loves history, especially the '50s era in which he and Nancy were teenagers. He first set up a small malt shop in the couple's former home in Mount Airy. They built another house in 1998, using a design that could accommodate a malt shop, and he started collecting authentic pieces to display and use in it.

The malt shop became a big hit, he said, as a place to celebrate class reunions, wedding parties, gatherings of senior citizens and visits from grandchildren.

The Banners, who grew up in Jonesville, met in first grade. They look back fondly on their days at Jonesville High School, a small school where everybody had an identity.

"Nancy was the chief cheerleader, and I played football," he said. They remember local hangouts where teenagers grooved to the latest tunes while they slurped on milkshakes and orangeades.

At 14, Reg Banner took a job scooping ice cream at a roadside stand. There, he learned from a woman who had trained with Sealtest how to make a proper banana split and nut sundae. He worked from 3 to 10 p.m. for $1 a day, minus the price of whatever he ate in ice cream. At 17, he became a curb hop at the Minute Grill in Jonesville, a favorite gathering spot for teenagers from Wilkes, Yadkin and Surry counties.

"It looked a lot like this," he said, gesturing at his malt shop. "After ballgames, the parking lot would be full of chrome and gaudy cars."

He and Nancy went to Appalachian State Teachers College (now Appalachian State University) and married in 1963. They have three children and four grandchildren. Reg retired from Pike Electric Corp. in Mount Airy in 2005.

When he and Nancy designed their retirement home in Winston-Salem, they made sure to make room for a malt shop that would hold his collections. They moved in last November. Reg hung a turquoise-and-pink cigarette machine that he bought in Hillsville, Va., on one wall. He filled shelves with turquoise-colored mixers, a blender and an ice crusher; Davy Crockett plates; and a plaid thermos, the kind that children of the '50s carried to school.

He hung a fallout shelter sign -- "In the '50s, everybody was scared of the bomb," he said -- and vintage, framed advertisements.

He set up a tribute to drive-in movie theaters, complete with a set of speakers that will play music when he hooks it up. He displayed photographs of his high-school and college days, including one in which he and Nancy dance the "vulgar" twist in front of a startled crowd at Jonesville High School.

In keeping with the '50s theme, the Banners added a pine-paneled den furnished with '50s-style furniture adjacent to the shop.

"Everybody in the late '40s and '50s had to have knotty pine," Reg said.

Guests walk through the den to get to the malt shop. A life-sized statue of a comely curb hop greets them at the entrance. Reg had the lighted bar built by a company in Mount Airy and ordered the shiny edging and '50s-style Formica top from a company in West Virginia. Turquoise walls and a black-and-white checkered floor provide a suitable backdrop for his collection of vintage signs, framed advertisements and Life magazine covers. Tiles in a spiffy color scheme of red, white and black decorate the wall behind the bar.

Reg is especially proud of items given to him by people who owned hangouts in Mount Airy. Ernie and Catherine Randleman ran the Randleman Drugstore, which stood a block from Mount Airy High School, for almost 30 years, he said.

"All the kids from several generations stopped in there." The Randlemans gave him a mixer capable of making several milkshakes at a time, a juice squeezer and a lighted Coca-Cola menu sign.

R.J. Hiatt, who ran the Triple A drugstore on Main Street in downtown Mount Airy, gave him a Rexall clock and two lighted 7-Up signs. Reg set up one sign's menu with 1956 prices: 30 cents for a nut sundae, 10 cents and 15 cents for ice-cream cones, 25 cents for a milkshake, and 45 cents for a banana split.

Reg serves his banana splits in old-fashioned glass boats that he bought off eBay. He deftly scoops up vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream, adds a satisfying dollop of chocolate syrup, a hefty sprinkling of walnuts and clouds of whipped cream. He plunks two cherries on top.

He and his wife enjoy seeing people who might not have eaten a banana split in years dig into one of his. "What makes it fun is that a lot of people won't buy banana splits," he said. "It's a good theme."

He snaps a photo of every guest who eats a banana split and adds it to a wall display.

Banner is equally adept at handling requests from his grandchildren. "Papa," they say, "fix us a milkshake." He is happy to oblige.

The malt shop gets plenty of use when visitors are around, but the Banners don't visit it every day.

"If we came down here all the time," Nancy said, "we couldn't fit through the door."

? Janice Gaston can be reached at 727-7364 or at jgaston@wsjournal.com.